{"id":10014,"date":"2016-10-31T08:01:31","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T13:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=10014"},"modified":"2016-10-31T08:01:31","modified_gmt":"2016-10-31T13:01:31","slug":"before-the-open-oct-31-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=10014","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Oct 31)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Good morning. Happy Monday. Happy Halloween. Hope you had a good weekend. <\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> The <strong>Asian\/Pacific<\/strong> markets closed mixed, but movement wasn&#8217;t much. Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand moved up; South Korea and Taiwan posted the biggest losses. <strong>Europe<\/strong> currently leans to the downside. France, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Italy are down the most. Futures in the <strong>States<\/strong> point towards a positive open for the cash market. <\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><!--more-->&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<br \/>\n<a style=\"font-weight: bold; font-size: medium;\" href=\"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/pdfs\/LB%20weekly%2020161030.pdf\">LB Weekly<\/a> &#8211; the indexes, the breadth indicators, a look at the big picture<br \/>\n&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> The dollar is up. Oil is down; copper is flat. Gold is down; silver is up. Bonds are up. <\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> I don&#8217;t have anything new to add to the <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/pdfs\/LB%20weekly%2020161030.pdf\">report<\/a> <\/strong>published yesterday morning. In it I concluded there isn&#8217;t much for the bulls to cling to. Market breadth is getting weaker. The quality and quantity of decent setups is waning, and the stocks that are breaking out aren&#8217;t following through much. The small caps have started to lag, and six of the nine S&amp;P Select groups are trading below their declining 50-day moving averages. <\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> If left alone the market should undergo a very normal and healthy correction to allow the charts to reset and start over. But we have an election coming up, and it&#8217;s my opinion the market government isn&#8217;t going to let the market drop much.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Be conservative out there. Preserve capital for a better environment. We saw what happened Monday when the Clinton\/FBI news hit the wires. Right now the #1 thing the market wants is a smooth and uncontested election. Anything that would lead Wall St. to believe it won&#8217;t happen will cause lots of volatility in the near term. More after the open. <\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><strong>Stock headlines<\/strong> from barchart.com&#8230;<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Level 3 Communications (LVLT +4.20%) jumped 4% in pre-market trading after CenturyLink agreed to buy the company in a cash, stock deal valued at $34 billion.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> General Electric (GE +2.06%) is up 1% and Baker Hughes (BHI +8.38%) jumped nearly 9% in pre-market trading after GE agreed to combine its oil and gas business with Baker Hughes.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Time Warner (TWX -0.94%) was upgraded to &#8216;Outperform&#8217; from &#8216;Market Perform&#8217; at FBR Capital Markets with a 12-month target price of $104.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Cinemark (CNK unch) was upgraded to &#8216;Buy&#8217; from &#8216;Neutral&#8217; at Goldman Sachs with a 12-month target price of $46.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Fortune Brands Home &amp; Security (FBHS -0.54%) was upgraded to &#8216;Overweight&#8217; from &#8216;Neutral&#8217; at JPMorgan Chase with a 12-month target price of $68.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> AutoNation (AN -4.13%) was downgraded to &#8216;Neutral&#8217; from &#8216;Buy&#8217; at Bank of America\/Merrill Lynch.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Home Depot (HD +1.08%) and Lowe&#8217;s (LOW -0.19%) were both downgraded to &#8216;Neutral&#8217; from &#8216;Overweight&#8217; at Piper Jaffray.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Chevron (CVX +3.90%) was upgraded to &#8216;Buy&#8217; from &#8216;Neutral&#8217; at Goldman Sachs with a 12-month price target of $118.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Sherwin-Williams (SHW -1.16%) said that it believes that &#8220;no or minimal&#8221; divestitures will be necessary to complete its acquisition of Valspar (VAL -7.14%) and said it expects the deal to close by the end of Q1-2017.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Tesla (TSLA -1.98%) CEO Elon Musk late Friday unveiled a new type of solar roof that will be offered by Tesla after its intended acquisition of Solar City (SCTY -0.53%). Musk also introduced a Powerwall 2 product with 14kWh of storage.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Crispr Therapeutics (CRSP +5.82%) rallied in after-hours trading after news that Bayer in a 13D filing disclosed a 12.8% stake in the company. In addition, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK -0.69%) disclosed an 8.3% stake in CRSP.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> Baidu&#8217;s (BIDU +2.56%) rating was cut to neutral from outperform at Macquarie.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> <strong>Today&#8217;s Economic Calendar<\/strong><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> 8:30 Personal Income and Outlays<br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> 9:45 Chicago PMI<br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> 10:30 Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey<br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> 3:00 Farm Prices<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\">Today&#8217;s Earnings <a href=\"http:\/\/seekingalpha.com\/earnings\/upcoming\">here<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><strong>Other<\/strong>&#8230;<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\">today&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.briefing.com\/investor\/calendars\/upgrades-downgrades\/\">upgrades\/downgrades<\/a> from briefing.com<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\">this week&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.briefing.com\/investor\/calendars\/earnings\/2016\/10\/31-04\/\">Earnings<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: medium;\">this week&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.briefing.com\/investor\/calendars\/economic\/2016\/10\/31-04\">Economic Numbers<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good morning. Happy Monday. Happy Halloween. Hope you had a good weekend. The Asian\/Pacific markets closed mixed, but movement wasn&#8217;t much. Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand moved up; South Korea and Taiwan posted the biggest losses. Europe currently leans to the downside. France, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Italy are down the most. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10014"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}